Conquer
by Valefor
Summary: A battle lost, a question asked. Why is it that things go as they do? Thus is Sora's dillemma... (PG for a mild curse, spoilers abound for those who've not seen the ending episodes of SIGN.)


**[[ _This one takes place during (and a little bit after) the final two episodes of SIGN, so be wary if you've not seen them. Just another little thing I've had floating around my head for a while._ ]]**

Mistake.

The harsh clang of steel on steel rang in his ears. It must have been a mistake. Yet his body dropped from the rooftop, flung down to the thick fog surrounding that damned place, his only retreat being a hasty warp back to the root town before he was lost beneath the mist. From the rooftop, a figure clad in crimson stared. In Mac Anu, a figure clad in black fell hard onto cold cobbled stones. Or at least they felt colder now. Somewhere, in a room all but silent (a small fan hummed a monotone lullaby), a boy shivered and swore.

It must have been a mistake. Must have been.

Here, he was the best - how else could he have gotten by doing as he did? There was no one to challenge them, or those few that did quickly fell beneath the razor edges of his katars. Twin Blades were the essence of grace, and of that particular brood, he thought himself supreme - rather, knew as much. All the best equipment, the highest level...

Sora never lost.

Eventually he pulled himself up from the ground. Thankfully the area of his respawning was relatively quiet and deserted; aggrivation boiled in his eyes, and the sly smirk that most often found itself sitting upon his lips had long since fled in the wake of a vile snarl. What had gone wrong?

"When you're fighting someone someone with the same parameters as you, who wins?" Crim had asked. "The one more into the fight!"

What a crock.

The World was, no matter how you looked at it, just a game. An outlet for entertainment, and an insanely popular one at that. A world of magic and of fighting the evils that plagued randomly generated lands. After all, playing out the life of something you simply weren't had a certain charm to it... He and him were separate. Weakness could not be tolerated, not here. There had to be a reason...

For now, a quiet place was where he wanted to be. The masses of people in The World did not require his attention at this time, nor did he want to even be in the vicinity of them. Two places in particular came to mind: the church, and... the other place. Even if his mood was incredibly sour he smiled: that place was _very_ interesting. Even if the church at Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground was unique as far as fields came, _that_ place topped it off by a landslide. So he went.

It was a place out of nightmare. In a way, it was like being submerged in a murky pond lit only by what little light shone through muddy brown waters. The 'ceiling' was a swirling vortex of bile-colored matter, and bits and pieces of unnamed somethings floated all around like bad memories. All in all a very dreary place, but one thing kept a sense of wonder close by. As Sora stepped out of the small portal that served as his gateway into the field, he looked up towards the very center of the whirling space above him.

Sora had known that it was quite possible that the pearly spectre of a girl that was suspended in the air could very well be the Key of the Twilight that everyone had been searching for. At first glance the she wasn't anything impressive if only because she hadn't quite done anything just yet. As he stared, she stayed still and silent as ever, indifferent to the frantic search that people the world over had been undertaking in her name. If she even had a name, anyways.

"Ne," Sora sighed, pacing in a small circle beneath the girl. "You're no use to anyone if you're just going to float there. You _are_ something important, aren't you? You've got your own location after all... As icky as it is."

He didn't expect the girl to say anything, but that didn't stop another presence from speaking up for her. All around, the weight of tremendous power seemed to waft in like an immense fog. "She is," a voice said simply.

"Is she really?" Sora asked, glaring up towards the nothingness. Disembodied voices were somewhat unnerving to deal with, if this one was truly disembodied... You could never be sure where it was coming from, or if it could be silenced should it strike a nerve. "Oba-chan, you know I don't like it when you keep things from me. Tell me everything."

From the void, he felt the impression of mirthless laughter. The voice was silken while deceptively thorny at the same time; doubtlessly a voice that knew the art of manipulation very well. Sultry female voices had a knack with that, after all. "She is everything. That is why she must stay."

"And that means?" he snapped, kicking a small pebble-like bit of brown off into the air, where it stuck like a fly caught in invisible glue. It would have surprised Sora if he hadn't known that this was not a normal place in The World.

"Your friends are foolish."

Sora's eyes narrowed at the ghost-like girl. "So... this thing is what my 'friends' are looking for?" He said the word with a bitter twist, almost spitting it out like it was the most obscene of phrases. Friends didn't hate you, and friends most definetly didn't shove you off of buildings. Bastard Crim...

The voice was quick to pick up on his tone. "Have they upset you, Sora?" she asked. Sora couldn't decide whether or not he could detect any hints of being mocked in her words. "If you had accepted my offer, maybe you wouldn't have lost..."

"You sure are nosy," he hissed, fighting off the urge to release his blades. They'd do no good against an invisible enemy for certain. "Even if I _did_ accept the Guardian, it wouldn't have done me any good. Using its powers would only make me weak, and that's not what I want at all!"

"But you would have won," she said cooly, with a certain nonchalance that made Sora leer. "Isn't that what matters the most? Being the best?"

"Oba-chan, you're not getting it." With resigned patience, he crossed his arms and tapped a toe against the glassy floor. "I do what I do by myself, and because of that, I've become what I am. Having some goonie do everything would put all my work to waste."

For a time the voice seemed to take his words into some consideration, for she kept quiet... Thankfully enough for Sora. He did not come here to be interrogated, after all. Hovering around the field were lenghty segmented blocks of nondescript solid matter, so he took the opportunity hop up, and up, and up... Like broken veins clotted up with brown blood, the structures wound up towards the vortex. When he found a branch where he could stand and lean against the 'trunk' of the winding structure, she spoke up again. "Work...? What is there for you to work for?"

"What have we been talking about? Geeze, pay attention!" he growled in response.

A sharp edge crawled into her voice but she remained unperturbed otherwise. "They seek the Key of the Twilight. They fight for it. But you, Sora... You play. What is there to work for?"

It was Sora's turn to consider. The obvious answer would be out of a simple matter of superiority, but for some reason that didn't feel right this time. Ever since he had started playing The World, all it was about was gaining levels. You go out to the dungeons, you kill everything, and you come out a few levels higher than you were before. And thus the slow progression up the unspoken pecking order was made, level by level, stat by stat. There was no question in his mind that he was the best at what he did, so... why did he bother?

The others... They knew what they wanted. From the very start, when Tsukasa's case was brought to light, they had known what to go after. Granted for most of the time they were utterly clueless about how to go about getting there, even to the point of being decieved by himself and that conniving BT. Even then, they had marched blindly onward... all for Tsukasa.

_... who wins? The one more into the fight..._

A heavy sigh escaped Sora's body, and at its end his eyes drew shut. "They all want the girl, hmm?" If he had realized then the many ways his question could be taken, he might have laughed. "Tsukasa-kun wants-"

"Something he cannot have," she purred sternly. "It is not him that I ask about. What of you, Sora?"

The voice went largely ignored after a short pause, where he picked right back up on his train of thought. "Tsukasa-kun wants her. Tsukasa-kun wants out. They want to help Tsukasa-kun, so... Heh." Sora snorted, tossing wry smile up at where he imagined his seemingly omnipotent hostess hid away. "Just maybe..."

It was then that a near deafening crackle of energy erupted from above. A flood of light from a single bolt of lightening splitting off into several, each dancing away and fizzing back into the nothingness that had dominated mere seconds before. In their wake...

_Tsukasa-kun...?_

They did not see him, as was probably to his benefit. Tsukasa flanked by Mimiru on one side and Subaru on the other stood, bewildered but otherwise unafraid. Something in particular was different about Tsukasa... Subaru always tended to look distant, even shy, and Mimiru was bold to the point of oafishness. Tsukasa-kun on the other hand... Something had changed.

The girl - Aura, was it? - descended before them and he reached out to touch the key... Tsukasa had learned what it was he fought for, and he was stronger because of it. 

Sora bowed his head slightly as he watched. Someone was getting angry; the weight of Her presence grew thicker, as if she had meant to suffocate them in her wrath, and all around the very fibers of digital reality blurred just barely within the boundaries of visual perception.

Getting upset... over a game.

Sora, player killer extraordinare, smiled. "So it goes... For Tsukasa-kun."

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It could be said that after some time, after the echoes of screams and flashes of light and pain, that he awoke. Simple as that. Yet to say as such would be to contribute to a grave inaccuracy: there was nothing to awaken from, nor nothing to awaken to.

Hope darkens, sadness and despair rules... Around him, ripples of gray, breezeless breeze washing over walls of solid liquid. All sensation was lost beneath the weight of dread and fear and worst of all, confusion. But at what?

In the bleakness he wondered, "_Where am I?_" yet no voice dared offer an answer. Not immediately anyway, or perhaps it was? A section, a fraction thereof, or a thousand passed before that silky venomous voice whispered (shrieked, laughed; the variables of volume and tone held as inconsequential and irrelevant):

"_Sleep now._"

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**[[_ I just might add some stuff onto this later on, but right now I'm not so sure. Right now I'm waiting for Outbreak to come out and apparently they've set the release date on that back a while... *shakes a fist* Cruelty, pure and true. Guess we'll see. :)_ ]]**


End file.
